"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”

The 'United Nations' started life in the hellfire of World War 2. 

Back then, it served as the group name for the Allied powers fighting to overthrow Hitler and his cronies around the world. 

As victory over the fascists came into view, the United Nations began to take shape as the international organisation we know today.

Eleanor Roosevelt holding a post of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Human ideals declared by the world 

It was the intent of the Allied peoples, encouraged especially by Franklin Roosevelt, that a permanent organisation of cooperation between states was needed to avoid yet another descent into world war.

In addition to questions of funding and logistics, the new UN needed a set of basic ideals – a statement of what it stood for.

This came most clearly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on this day in 1948.

A year after the end of the war, the UN’s Commission on Human Rights set up a drafting committee for an ambitious, universal declaration.

The committee was chaired by no less than Eleanor Roosevelt herself. The former First Lady had long been a champion of human rights within the US and around the world, and here was her chance to help craft the soul of the United Nations.

Alongside legal experts from all over the world – Chile, Lebanon, China, Russia, France – Roosevelt worked to draft a Universal Declaration of Human Rights over the course of 1947-8.

Its ambition was formidable: to set down in writing the inalienable rights possessed by every human being on the planet, by virtue of being a human, and then have all the states of the world agree to it. 

There was debate, often fierce, over what to include in the Declaration and how to word it. 

Click to view our Universal Declaration of Human Rights tea towel

A limited yet important declaration 

The Chilean delegate, Hernán Santa Cruz, pushed the committee towards more socio-economic rights whereas some of the Westerners preferred to limit things to the purely civil and political ones.

Peng Chun Chang, a member from China, argued for having a secular language in the Declaration, free of Christian overtones, to make its appeal more truly universal across human cultures.

As the draft went through further phases of consultation, it was the Indian feminist, Hansa Jivraj Mehta, who managed to change the wording from "all men are created equal" to "all human beings".

The finished product was approved by a majority vote of the UN General Assembly in Paris (back before it was permanently settled in New York) on 10th December' 1948.

The final text was not perfect. People continue to argue that the Universal Declaration is 'universal' in name only, representing an expression of Western norms more than any others. There’s also a long-running debate over whether it addresses social and economic rights sufficiently.

But in declaring to the world, on behalf of the world, that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights", it set the terms of debate on the common ground of human equality – in direct opposition to the white supremacism of the defeated Nazis. 

Click to view our Eleanor Roosevelt tea towel

A declaration still upheld to this day 

Out of the carnage of the Second World War, plenty of visions for a better world emerged – free of fascism and abundant in human freedom.

The vision of a 'socialist commonwealth' embraced by the Attlee government in Britain, Hannah Arendt’s anti-totalitarianism, the defiant imaginings of a world beyond the darkness held tight by the Jewish resistance heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has a place among these dreams of a better future to come.